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arXiv:2507.20600

Random measurements are almost maximally incompatible

Andreas Blühm, Cécilia Lancien, Ion Nechita

Published Jul 28, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

In this work, we investigate the incompatibility of random quantum measurements. Most previous work has focused on characterizing the maximal amount of white noise that any fixed number of incompatible measurements with a fixed number of outcomes in a fixed dimension can tolerate before becoming compatible. This can be used to quantify the maximal amount of incompatibility available in such systems. The present article investigates the incompatibility of several classes of random measurements, i.e., the generic amount of incompatibility available. In particular, we show that for an appropriate choice of parameters, both random dichotomic projective measurements and random basis measurements are close to being maximally incompatible. We use the technique of incompatibility witnesses to certify incompatibility and combine it with tools from random matrices and free probability.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2507.20600

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In this work, we investigate the incompatibility of random quantum measurements. Most previous work has focused on characterizing the maximal amount of white noise that any fixed number of incompatible measurements with a fixed number of outcomes in a fixed dimension can tolerate before becoming compatible. This can be used to quantify the maximal amount of incompatibility available in such systems. The present article investigates the incompatibility of several classes of random measurements, i.e., the generic amount of incompatibility available. In particular, we show that for an appropriate choice of parameters, both random dichotomic projective measurements and random basis measurements are close to being maximally incompatible. We use the technique of incompatibility witnesses to certify incompatibility and combine it with tools from random matrices and free probability.
Measurement incompatibility stipulates the existence of quantum measurements that cannot be carried out simultaneously on single systems. We show that the set of input-output probabilities obtained from ddd-dimensional classical systems assisted with shared randomness is the same as the set obtained from ddd-dimensional quantum strategies restricted to compatible measurements with shared randomness in any communication scenario. Thus, measurement incompatibility is necessary for quantum advantage in communication, and any quantum advantage (with or without shared randomness) in communication acts as a witness to the incompatibility of the measurements at the receiver's end in a semi-device-independent way. We introduce a class of communication tasks---a general version of random access codes---to witness incompatibility of an arbitrary number of quantum measurements with arbitrary outcomes acting on ddd-dimensional systems and provide generic upper bounds on the success metric of these tasks for compatible measurements. We identify all sets of three incompatible rank-one projective qubit measurements that random access codes can witness. Finally, we present the generic relationship between different sets of probability distributions---classical, quantum with or without shared randomness, and quantum restricted to compatible measurements with or without shared randomness---produced in communication scenarios.
We present a trade-off between the amount of observed measurement incompatibility and the capabilities of a classical Eavesdropper in a prepare-and-measure scenario. The result is based on a qualitative connection between measurement incompatibility and randomness generation together with the utilization of incompatibility witnesses as randomness certificates. This allows one to use a geometric measure of incompatibility, the generalised robustness, to bound Eve's strategies through a semi-definite program, while providing an explicit protocol for generating randomness from any set of incompatible measurements. By translating the result to quantum steering, we find a tight connection between steerability and randomness generation in a setting using any finite number of measurement inputs. We further show how our techniques can be generalised to scenarios where Eve has a quantum memory by using a dimensional generalisation of joint measurability.
It is well known that when two or more quantum measurements suffer from imperfections they may lose their incompatibility. For a quantum system of finite dimension ddd we study the incompatibility of all projective measurements subjected to white noise and loss. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for this set of measurements to become compatible in terms of their visibility ppp and efficiency $\ensuremath{\eta}$.
Certifying maximal quantum randomness without assumptions about system dimension remains a pivotal challenge for secure communication and foundational studies. Here, we introduce a generalized framework to directly certify maximal randomness from observed probability distributions across systems with arbitrary user numbers, without relying on the Bell-inequality violations. By analyzing probability distributions directly, we identify a class of quantum states and projective measurements that achieve maximal randomness in bipartite and tripartite scenarios, ensuring practical feasibility. Further analysis reveals a counterintuitive trade-off governing measurement incompatibility among users: sufficient incompatibility for one user permits arbitrarily small incompatibility for others, defying conventional symmetry assumptions in the Bell test. This asymmetry provides a pathway to optimize device-independent protocols by strategically distributing quantum resources. Our results establish a versatile and experimentally accessible route to scalable randomness certification, with implications for quantum cryptography and the physics of nonlocal correlations.
We consider the question of characterizing the incompatibility of sets of high-dimensional quantum measurements. We introduce the concept of measurement incompatibility in subspaces. That is, starting from a set of measurements that is incompatible, one considers the set of measurements obtained by projection onto any strict subspace of fixed dimension. We identify three possible forms of incompatibility in subspaces: (i) incompressible incompatibility---measurements that become compatible in every subspace, (ii) fully compressible incompatibility---measurements that remain incompatible in every subspace, and (iii) partly compressible incompatibility---measurements that are compatible in some subspace and incompatible in another. For each class, we discuss explicit examples. Finally, we present some applications of these ideas. First, we show that joint measurability and coexistence are two inequivalent notions of incompatibility in the simplest case of qubit systems. Second, we highlight the implications of our results for tests of quantum steering.
The unpredictability of quantum physics gives rise to intrinsic randomness. In an adversarial scenario, any additional degrees of freedom must be attributed to an eavesdropper with correlations to the measurement set-up. The true randomness is then quantified by the probability that she correctly guesses the measurement outcomes, optimised over all possible strategies. Extremal measurements are appealing here, since they do not allow information to leak to such an eavesdropper. Beyond projective measurements, however, a simple question remains open: how much intrinsic randomness can be generated by a given extremal measurement? In a step towards solving it, we characterise the randomness generated by any unbiased extremal rank-one measurement acting on any state, solving the problem explicitly in dimension two. Four-outcome qubit measurements of this type are tomographic, so these results hold for fully source-device-dependent randomness too. The tetrahedral symmetric informationally complete (SIC) measurement, we find, has the least intrinsic randomness within this class. We also present the skewed SIC family of measurements, and use them to partially solve an open problem: we prove that 2log⁡d2 \log d2logd bits of randomness, the maximal amount, can be generated device-dependently (or source-device-independently) in any dimension in which there exists a SIC measurement.